Paul Desjardins (educator)

Louis Paul Abel Desjardins (22 November 1859 – 13 March 1940) was a French teacher and journalist. For thirty years, he led the annual meetings of intellectuals committed to freedom of opinion, the Decades of Pontigny.

Biography

Paul Desjardins was born in the 2nd arrondissement of Paris, the son of Ernest Desjardins, a professor at the Collège de France and a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.

A pupil of the philosopher Jules Lagneau at the Lycée Michelet in Vanves, he founded, with his teacher and a few friends, the Union pour l'Action Morale (Union for Moral Action) in 1893, in order "to overcome the anomie of the times with a Godless form of Christian morality". This ecumenical association brought together personalities of all persuasions: Gabriel Séailles, the future Marshal Lyautey, Gabriel Monod, Pastor Wagner, the Swiss symbolist painter Carlos Schwabe and others.

In 1896, L'Union made itself known to the public through a resounding publicity campaign by having a large print commissioned from Puvis de Chavannes, based on his decoration of the Panthéon (Sainte Geneviève) and engraved by Auguste Lauzet, displayed on the walls of Paris. This ‘Moral Poster’, intended to bring beauty to the people, was praised or mocked in the press and gave visibility to the actions of Desjardins and his friends. The Union broke up during the Dreyfus affair, giving rise to L'Union pour la Vérité on the one hand, and Action Française of Henri Vaugeois and Maurice Pujo on the other. A Dreyfus supporter, Desjardins headed the Union pour la Vérité.

A graduate of the École Normale Supérieure and holder of an agrégation in literature, Desjardins taught at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and Condorcet (where he was a khâgne teacher), as well as at the Collège Stanislas. He then taught at the École normale supérieure de Sèvres.

In 1906, in the context of the separation of Church and State, Desjardins bought Pontigny Abbey and subsequently organised annual meetings of intellectuals there, the Decades of Pontigny, which were held from 1910 to 1914, then resumed after the war in 1922.

In 1928, he took part in the first Davos University Conferences, along with many other French and German intellectuals. As a journalist, he wrote his first articles for the Revue Bleue, then contributed to the Figaro, but also wrote for other periodicals such as the Journal des Débats.

Private life

His brother, Abel Desjardins (born 1870), was a classmate of Marcel Proust and later of Robert Proust at the Lycée Condorcet, where Paul taught from 1906. His daughter, Anne Heurgon-Desjardins, wife of the academic Jacques Heurgon, continued his work by founding the Centre culturel international de Cerisy-la-Salle in 1952. Following his death in 1977, her daughters, Edith Heurgon and Catherine Peyrou, took over the cultural activities initiated by their grandfather. Since Catherine Peyrou's death in 2006, Edith Heurgon has been running the CCIC.

References

• Chaubet, François (1999). "L'Union pour l'action morale et le spiritualisme républicain (1892-1905)," Mil neuf cent, No. 17, pp. 67–89.
• Chaubet, François (2000). Paul Desjardins et les Décades de Pontigny. Villeneuve-d'Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion.
• Poulat, Émile (1982). "Néo-christianisme et modernisme. Autour de Paul Desjardins." In: Modernistica. Horizons. Physionomies. Débats. Paris: Les Nouvelles éditions latines, Paris, pp. 110–36.

External links

• Works by Paul Desjardins at Gallica